The nogitsune feels filthy. He'd like a shower.
He'd also like a toilet that flushes instead of a hole in the floor, but one can't have everything.
As if Hale can read his thoughts, he's down the next day with fresh clothing, toilet paper, soap, a toothbrush, enough water so that the nogitsune can at least rinse himself, and one, blue-and-white capsule.
"What's that?" says the nogitsune.
"Your Adderall," Hale replies.
"Mine's orange-colored."
"It's a capsule, not a pill," Derek replies. "It's still fifteen milligrams. Look: it says on the side."
The nogitsune examines the pill from every angle. It smells like Adderall, plus the starchy-sweet smell of gelatin. When he unscrews the capsule and flicks his tongue out to tastes its insides, it tastes like Adderall does when he lets it sit too long on his tongue: bitter and unpleasant, leaving a characteristic, tingling numbness in its wake. He hands both halves back to Hale face-up, full of powder.
Derek unscrews the top off of a bottle of water. Then, he takes one of the pill-halves from the nogitsune, upends it into the bottle, and taps its sides until the powder stops clinging to the shiny, gelatin edges. He caps the bottle and shakes it vigorously for a moment, then hands it back.
"Thank you," says the nogitsune. He squints at Hale, suddenly struck by the enormity of it all. Hale and his Pack created this bolt-hole. Hale has been feeding, medicating, washing, and watering the body of Stiles Stilinski like someone who keeps giving a plant fertilizer pellets and water because they're too clueless to realize it's withered and rotten at the root. Even the trickster can't find that funny, someone caring for something that can't ever thrive, can't even be real, ever again. It's plodding and boring – and sad and pathetic – but not funny at all. It's useless is what it is.
Nevertheless, he turns away from Hale not out of human modesty but because he can't stand to look at his face anymore, and strips. The filthy clothing goes in a pile, and he dumps an entire bottle of water over his head right away. It feels good. Hale has brought soap, if not shampoo; he gets up a good lather in his hair and pours another bottle over it, and the soap washes over his shoulders and arms, rinsing away the first layer of filth. He scrubs the rest of himself quickly, efficiently. A third bottle of water is carefully rationed to rinse each limb, genitals, underarms, back, ass.
Hale hands him a towel and he feels – human again was the phrase he was going to use, but it's not appropriate.
Next is clothing. Derek hands him boxer shorts, an old pair of jeans, Stiles's favorites, that are soft and drape over his hands like silk, a second, dark purple hoodie, a pair of socks, sneakers minus laces. The second hoodie is minus laces, too. Wow with the thorough, the nogitsune thinks, but Derek has learned just how close he is to doing something drastic. And this is just what he was thinking of when he was first trapped here a week or so ago, that a partner who learned fast made a more exciting game, but this is unlike any game the nogitsune has ever played before. He feels as though he is off the board entirely, or else playing a version with insane, local rules.
And to punctuate that, Hale smiles at him now that he's clean, glances down at his still-bare feet – but most of the floor is wet, now, and wet socks are gross no matter where you're from or who you are – and slides into his space like he belongs there. "How are you?" he says.
"I'm going crazy. There's nothing to do," the nogitsune replies, but very soft, which is ridiculous because they're not close enough for whispering, but something about the situation makes him feel like he should speak in a hush.
Perhaps this instinct is correct, because his hushed voice is rewarded a moment later: Hale sidles closer, and that hand goes right where the neck and shoulder meet, that most helpless and exposed place where the veins and arteries run just beneath the skin; Hale cups it with his palm, and the fight goes out of the nogitsune like a flame in a high wind, and he sways towards Hale, whose other hand finds the small of his back, almost like they're dancing at prom, and the ridiculous image seems to wake him a little, shake him in the brainpan a moment because he is pretty sure that Derek Hale is holding him tenderly.
No one who has known what he is has ever touched him with kindness like this, and the nogitsune thinks that he might've been nicer, better, good, if he had understood the system of rewards a little better. Until this moment, he'd always found himself contemptuous of those who he'd managed to fool, thinking, surely you love him better than this. Surely you can see him better than this. And when they inevitably failed the test – when the nogitsune was able to use its host's memory to replicate mannerisms, speech, gait, habit, idiom… when sometimes, even, the nogitsune could sit back and let muscle memory and speech patterns patter on ahead of it… its disdain only deepened. One day it decided that love was a mirage, an illusion that humans projected on any target who would stand still long enough to play along.
But now that Hale is doing the opposite – comforting him in the hope it reaches Stiles Stilinski…
The nogitsune leans his forehead against Derek Hale's shoulder and presses in, because this is new and new is good, and Hale has to give up on him sometime, and that can happen anytime, so this might be the only time he gets to have this.
The nogitsune feels, eventually, that Derek leads him to the side of the cave that is a little higher-ground, an arm around his shoulders, and that they re-settle there, where it's dry. He drinks his Adderall-infused water slowly, until it is completely gone; and Derek reads him poetry:
Has anyone seen the boy
who used to come here?
Round-faced trouble-maker,
quick to find a joke,
slow to be serious, red shirt,
perfect coordination, sly,
strong muscled,
with things always in his pocket:
reed flute, worn pick,
polished and ready for his Talent-
you know that one.
Have you heard stories about him?
Pharaoh and the whole Egyptian world
collapsed for such a Joseph.
I'd gladly spend years getting word
of him, even third or fourth hand.
The nogitsune closes its eyes and doesn't say anything at all.
"I'm reluctant to give you anything," Derek says when the nogitsune begs that just reading isn't enough. "I don't know what you'll do with it."
The nogitsune doesn't argue. He figures he would leap away from here the moment he had the chance: away from Derek Hale and Scott McCall, and away from Sheriff Stilinski, and he would ruin their lives all over again by being a lost cause if nothing else. And though he cares about that, now – just a little – he also knows himself.
If you know people, you grow attached to them. If you grow attached to them, you care what becomes of them. And tricksters are hedonists who care primarily for their own amusement. So a trickster has to be genius at the art of oblivion. He knows that, after a few days of worry, he would forget them.
But maybe Stiles Stilinski's brain is enough to hold them all?
He's read – (Stiles has read) all about the brain, and the way that muscle memory works, and really, if he has muscle memory and factual memory, there is no reason he shouldn't also have memory of personal experiences… with all the attendant emotion attached. Unless there is something blocking them.
Self-preservation, maybe. Stiles Stilinski had a boatload of problems before he was possessed. Would he survive the knowledge that he's murdered people, if he could allow himself fully-human memories? Or would the guilt crush him? (The guilt is already crushing him; he can never be fully human again.)
Derek is looking at him with narrowed, Sourwolf eyes, so suspicious that what comes out of his mouth next is incongruous; the nogitsune can't parse it for a minute.
"…Scott?" he says, finally, blinking.
"Maybe you're ready for a second visitor?" Hale says, and he says it with such a tentative note in his voice that the nogitsune is quick to reassure him that it's safe.
Is it safe? (Am I safe?) The nogitsune isn't sure.
Certainly the opportunity for playing the trickster abounds. He could play the two off of one another. He could ask to be with Scott alone (would Derek allow that?) and swear that Derek was abusing him down here. Sexually, maybe, with the way that Derek's scent is all over Stiles's body. He could cry, could beg to be taken somewhere, anywhere else. Could promise to be good. (Might even mean it.)
But if that fails, how long would it be before Derek would trust him enough to let him have another visitor? What if Derek leaves him alone after that, not just denying him other visitors, but denying him Derek himself? What if Derek leaves him here to rot, forgets to drop down food and water and Adderall?
The nogitsune can't bear it.
But you can't trap a fox, he thinks, vicious. You can't domesticate one. He's angry at the thought.
Hale seems to realize that the very idea of another visitor has upset his balance so badly that he won't be able to focus on reading that evening. Instead, Hale yanks him so that Stiles's body is lying partly in his lap and strokes Stiles's newly-clean hair into some kind of order, like he's gotta look his best tomorrow, and the nogitsune snorts before falling deeply asleep.
(Scott. Scotty. Scotty-Scott.) is coming. The nogitsune wishes for a mirror, but that could provide a weapon if he broke it, so he won't get one. He knows he doesn't look very much like (himself) Stiles Stilinski, who had good color-sense and nice skinny-jeans and interesting shoes, who styled his hair upright with gel every morning and knew how to coordinate layers.
That guy is so dead and gone he feels like an ancestor.
But he's clean, and yesterday Derek brought deodorant, so he smells all right, and toothpaste, too, although Derek took them both away the moment the nogitsune was done with them. He's slender but no longer skeletal, and if the cave living has been so awesome for him, it's only a testament to how badly he was treating this body, before. Derek's been nodding at him lately, satisfied, saying he's 'putting on weight', which is madness, but since he eats everything the Sourwolf brings him and looks for more, he guesses it must be true. Derek appears and fusses over him, allowing him to re-apply the deodorant and giving him a piece of gum to chew, and messing with his hair and giving him his Adderall.
"I'm not a kindergartener about to be sent off to his first day of school," he says flatly. "You gotta stop fussing."
So Derek does. He stands silently at the nogitsune's side, except for when he reaches out and squeezes their hands together. Then, his head jerks up. Moments later, Stiles's human ears catch up: someone is pacing around the aperture that leads up into the sunlight.
And pacing.
And pacing.
The nogitsune uses Stiles's imagination to picture what's going on up there, Scott all flustered and worried. Stiles's memories spit up the first day of junior high, Stiles helping Scott choose which outfit to wear. What if no one likes us, Scott had said, and in any other kid that would've translated to what if no one likes me, but this was Scott, which meant he was at least as concerned about Stiles as he was about himself.
Then, like thunder after lightning, a wash of fierce protective fondness goes supernova in the vicinity of Stiles's human chest and spreads, tingling, down to his fingers and toes: Pack, before Stiles knew what Pack was.
And then Scott's leaping in front of them, making a three-point landing and pushing upright, and before the nogitsune is sure which tack he's going to take, muscle memory is deciding for him: his arms twitch out to the sides, he croaks Scott's name and they're in one another's arms, two asymmetrical halves of some piece of modern art that would fall apart if separated to stand alone, and Stiles's human body is being clasped, being held, and his human nose is full of the distinctive smell of his best friend: woodland and fir and teenaged boy, and his ears are full of "Stiles. Stiles. Stiles," said in his best friend's voice, and –
Something ruptures in him like a metastasizing tumor. Like one of those horrible aliens that bursts out of the characters' chests and eats everyone, and...
He cries.
He can't stop, and Scotty is holding him about as tightly as a werewolf can hold a human, and he can tell Scott is getting really worried, so he tries to be cool, he's beginning to get that face-heat that means he's turning red with embarrassment, but apparently the crying jag has to die down naturally, and eventually – eventually it does.
"Oh God, dude, I'm so sorry," he says when they finally pull back, and it's like he suddenly knows how inadequate that is – that a sword through the chest is nothing, but your best friend – your best friend like that, like he is to Scott – (was? Oh god) – leaning close, comforting you, telling you it's all right as he twists the blade, with exaggerated concern on his face –
(He wants to throw up.)
But Scott is taking the oblivious route, either through habit or, in a bout of surprising maturity, pretending to assume Stiles is talking about weeping all over him like he did when they watched the Notebook together (which no one shall speak of henceforth and ever again). "It's okay," he says, and his eyes are positively alight with joy. "I'm glad you're – in a hugging kind of mood."
"Yeah," Stiles says – because it's Stiles when Scott's around, definitely. He feels… totally, one-hundred percent human around Scott McCall.
Well. Give or take.
When did that happen?
"I brought you a Mountain Dew," Scott says, rooting around in his backpack all shy, and it's like they're meeting again at five years old, and Scott is sharing his M&Ms with Stiles at lunch. Totally evenly, and letting Stiles pick the colors out that he doesn't like.
"Wow, dude, thanks," Stiles says, accepting the drink while looking at Derek.
Derek is watching them like they're a new species on the nature channel, which. Well. The nogitsune can hardly blame him.
"So, uh, tell me the all the news," Stiles says. "How's Lydia?"
"Don't," says Derek.
Scott shoots Derek a look like he's being totally unfair, which immediately makes the nogitsune consider the many ways in which he can exploit this attitude. But just as soon as the expression arrives, it disappears, is replaced by weariness.
Scott is familiar with how normal the nogitsune can make this body behave. He sneaks an apologetic look Stiles's way, but leans gamely back against the cave wall and removes Stiles's schoolbooks from his bag.
Schoolbooks!
Stiles's human brain and his fox nature need stimulation, and the sight of the schoolbooks wakes a fire in him. Before he's aware of what he's doing, he's babbled a monologue about the poetry Derek has been reading to him and how the book is divided into life-stages, and how that reminds him of Erikson's Phases of Psychosocial Development, and Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, which is what they were learning in Intro to Psychology before Stiles began losing track of his marbles. It can barely be called a conversation, because Stiles's mouth barely lets Scott get a word in edgewise, though eventually even he has to quiet.
By the time he does, he's spoken himself hoarse. He can't stop his hands from roving Scott's form, either, little touches that remind him this is real: brushes of their thighs as they sit together, a rasp of cloth-on-cloth as they reach for a drink at the same time. He's caught himself counting his fingers on three separate occasions, and he's pretty sure that Derek caught him at it, too, at least once.
"I brought your homework assignments from the past few weeks," Scott tells him, and he decides he loves Scotty-Scott forever.
"Oh, man, I never thought I'd be happy to hear anyone tell me they had weeks of assignments for me, but I so, so am. You have no idea how boring it is, down here."
"Do you want me to bring you your phone?"
Gladness springs up in Stiles's heart before he ruthlessly crushes it. "You can order things through the phone. Ship them. Uh, post things to blogs. Send emails. Texts. Hack?"
Scott stares. "But you're better?"
Stiles squirms.
Scott's eyes narrow. "That you're aware of what you shouldn't have. That's a good first step, right? You seem so normal."
"Well, I'm faking it. I've been faking it. Don't you remember me faking it?" Stiles says, voice breaking.
"…Stiles –"
"I'm not him," Stiles hisses, even though it feels like a lie just now. "What does a guy have to do to make you get with the program, shove another sword through your gut and twist it?"
Derek, who's been hanging back until now, steps forward.
"And you stay out of this, Sourwolf!" Stiles orders, but as usual his commands to Derek have no effect.
Instead, Derek does his touch-thing which makes him calmer at first, but then angrier, because he is no tame fox.
"Are you taking my pain when you do that?" Stiles can't believe it hasn't occurred to him until now that this is what Derek is doing when he touches Stiles's neck. It's weird that now he's examining things from the human perspective, he's more suspicious of the human brand of affection.
"Stiles. Stop it," Derek says, quiet.
A second wash of reassurance nearly knocks Stiles's knees together, and this time he can't fight it so hard. Won't. Doesn't want to. He closes his eyes. "Okay. Okay. Scott. Scotty-Scott," he says, turning. "I'm still working on it, okay?"
"Okay," Scotty-Scott says. He sounds gutted. Like, literally, and Stiles should know.
"I really. Thanks for coming. Thanks for the Mountain Dew."
And they're on approach again, Scott opening his arms and Stiles kind of falling into them and squeezing the life out of Scott, who is clearly dampening his werewolf strength to match Stiles's weak humanity exactly, so he can grip him just as hard and right after a fight, but that's Scott and Stiles, and the nogitsune still feels like Stiles Stilinski down underneath his skin when Scott finally leaps out of the aperture and dashes away.
"Huh," Derek says. "I should bring Scott by more often. You should see your face."
The nogitsune doesn't want to see its stolen face. It wants, with great urgency, to know what is happening. "Maybe Deaton next," he says, because if he remembers anything from being Stiles Stilinski, it's that Deaton is who you call when you're clueless as fuck.
"Maybe later on," Derek rumbles. "Really, though. There's, like, a light behind your eyes."
"Shut up," the nogitsune says, feeling like warm coals are sitting banked in his chest, his guts, and - yeah - prickling behind his eyes.
The nogitsune dreams.
It's at the school, in the boys' locker room, and a thready voice emerges from one of the lockers that stands along the wall.
"Please," the voice begs. "Let me out. Let me out."
"Let me in, Stiles," the nogitsune says, but he says it in Stiles Stilinski's voice, and everything about that voice is just the same, down to that wavering, desperate note.
The locker door bangs open; a whipcord-thin arm, pale, juts forth from its confines to grip the front of the nogitsune's hoodie. Yanks. The locker slams shut.
Suddenly the inside of the locker is big enough for two. Just. The nogitsune is face-to-face with Stiles Stilinski.
Stiles looks like he's panicking. His breaths are coming fast, there are red circles under his eyes – are there still red circles under the nogitsune's? – and his lashes are clumped together with crying. The nogitsune has never seen anything more human in its life. Suddenly, he feels that alienness in himself worse than a hammer's blow. If Scott made him feel like a human being, standing next to the real thing makes him feel like Pinocchio, body stuffed with straw. A golem for someone else's revenges.
The nogitsune decides to try out its newest human skill. It reaches out to Stiles and places its hand at the junction of neck and shoulder and squeezes.
Stiles backs as far away as he can within the confined space. He closes his eyes, and the nogitsune knows it's not because the human touch has relaxed the human boy. He's gasping for breath. In a moment, he'll get that fight-or-flight response, adrenaline, noradrenaline, which will tell him he has to run. He'll flee the locker before the nogitsune can get hold of him and maybe it'll be the last the nogitsune sees of him. Forever.
"Come on, Stiles," it says, ducking down to peer up into Stiles's panicking features. "You were so good, so clever. Such fun. Don't tell me you're through."
"I'm gonna… keep fighting you…" Stiles says, although he isn't meeting the nogitsune's eyes. He seems to be talking to himself, if anything, and he nods fiercely once or twice to underscore the promise. "But what are you doing?" he says, whispering through tears, and it sounds like calling Scott in the middle of the night, trapped in that basement with god-knew-what, his ankle trapped…
And like thunder after lightning, the desperation of that moment slams into him, on the foundation of faith that Scott would find him, implacable and unshakable.
"…you're not pretending to me be," Stiles is saying. "They know you're not me… What are you even hoping to gain from this?" And then Stiles is looking, really looking, and he says, "do you even know?"
And the nogitsune's own breath is coming fast, and it can feel the hint of tears clumping its eyelashes together, and then Stiles Stilinkski's eyes are very close to his. The sight of the nogitsune going through a panic attack seems to be surprising enough to cut his own off at the knees.
Stiles's eyes in the crisscrossing of the opening to the locker are a warm, honey-gold as he examines the nogitsune. "Focus on one point. Stop looking around, there's nothing there. Focus on one thing: in the distance, I'd tell you, but there is no distance, is there?"
The nogitsune focuses on Stiles Stilinski's eyes and the locker seems to stop trembling at the corners of his vision. Stiles frowns, then reaches forward to lay his hand on the side of the nogitsune's neck.
"You weren't trying to hurt me. You thought that might calm me down? Because it works on you," Stiles observes, and this is why the nogitsune wanted to be him so badly, because of that whirring brain of his, a machine of a million cogs.
The nogitsune feels wary beneath its admiration: a fox, cornered by the hounds after it's led them a merry chase. But it jerks a nod, looking at Stiles only out of the corner of its eye, now.
"Are you becoming me?" Stiles asks. "Because dude, that would be hilarious. And totally, and I mean totally what you deserve. Grieve for what you did to our friends and family. Go ahead, that'll be awesome. Rejoice in your ninety-pound weakling status. That's what you get for picking this little hotel."
That does sound like justice to the nogitsune. It even sounds funny – a good trick. If he emerges from this thinking he is Stiles Stilinski.
Suddenly, he knows. That's just what Hale is hoping for.
But how could Hale have guessed that a plan like that would work? It's a Divine Move like no other the nogitsune has ever encountered. It hasn't occurred to anyone else that he's anything other than a monster.
It's never occurred to him.
So: he's been isolated so that he only sees Derek and Scott. He's been reliant on Derek for company, and Derek is feeding him a steady diet of literature and quiet and physical affection, and it's starting to work. They'll call him Stiles and one day, he'll answer to it.
The nogitsune is all kinds of fond of psychological manipulation, and it's not hard to believe that the nogitsune could be led into caring for Derek and Scott, if it has the capability in the first place – and, evidently, it does. But how could they have known that he'd be Stiles, instead of just a tame fox with Stiles's face?
The water. It's the water. Derek brings it every day and watches as he washes it down, and the nogitsune always thought that was because the Adderall is dissolved in it, and if it spills or he forgets to finish it, he'll be off the rest of the day. But what if there is something in it? Or Derek's hands? Derek touches him a lot – a lot more than he touched Stiles Stilinski, ever – and maybe there is something to that. Those were speculations fueled by panic-attack-induced paranoia, sure, but just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't all out to get you.
Stiles's thumb is stroking the tendon in the nogitsune's neck, and it's just distracting enough that the nogitsune jerks its head up. "What's going on in your head, dude?" Stiles says, and he looks calm and gentle and still very fragile.
"That you're right. I'm becoming you. I'm being manipulated. I'm being controlled." The nogitsune remembers: not trusting its own thoughts. Panic. "I'm always being manipulated by someone. Scott came by."
Stiles freezes, like small prey scenting a fox on the wind, but the nogitsune hadn't hurt Scott; it hadn't entered his mind to want to.
The nogitsune shakes its head. "I can't do this. I can't be human. I'm not built for it. Push through, Stiles. I'll let you. I'll leave."
Stiles's face changes, and suddenly he looks very grown-up, and very sad. "You know you're dreaming now, right?"
"Yeah," the nogitsune says. Of course. "I'm not really in the boys' locker room, so."
"But you gotta know I'm not really here. I'm not anywhere anymore. You got rid of me."
"No," the nogitsune says. "No, you're here. You've got to still be with me, I can't be alone in this." The thought that he can't step away from the game has him feeling sick, hemmed-in.
"But you are. You've made sure of it," Stiles says. "I'm your memory of Stiles Stilinski. You knew that, right?" He's careful to be sure the nogitsune gets it, the way Stiles is always careful: careful hands, careful mind. "If you left now, this," he says, gesturing to his own body, "would be empty. A toy with dead batteries. Maybe it'd keep breathing, maybe its heart'd keep beating. I don't know. But it wouldn't be me."
For a long time, the nogitsune lies, still, in the dark. Then, it sits up and scrubs hands through Stiles's crazy hair. (Hair grows at a rate of 0.5-inches to 1.5-inches a month.) So his hair could be around an inch longer than it was the last time he had a mirror. His hair grows fast; it could be longer.
For the first time, the nogitsune wonders what they're doing to keep Stiles's father away.
Sure, Sheriff Stilinski knows, intellectually, that the body he's wearing no longer houses his son. But the nogitsune believes, with all of Stiles's massive, unshakeable faith in his friends and his family, that the Sheriff wouldn't let that stop him for long.
What's more absolute than the love of a parent for a child? Could the nogitsune really have stood before a wave of such love and stood unaffected?
The answer is yes, it thinks. At first, certainly. It would have seemed like too much. It would have seemed impossible, the strength of that love. The nogitsune would have thought it was a trick, like all the love it's seen before.
But somehow, Derek's care is different: non-romantic, non-brotherly, non-parental, it hovers weirdly in the center of some paradoxical Venn diagram of all three: the behavior of an Alpha to Pack. And the nogitsune could just barely grasp that with the tips of its fingers if it tried when it first landed here.
Now, it feels that way about Sheriff Stilinski's love, like if it lets its attention go out of focus, it can just begin to accept the fierce love Stiles's father feels – out of its emotional peripheral vision – when he looks at his son's… form. Because there's nothing of Stiles Stilinski, left.
The nogitsune isn't sure it believes that, though. It was a dream. What if it were just his worst fears talking to him? What if Stiles Stilinski is in there somewhere, just buried deep? And hiding?
(And glad of it.)
He shies away from Hale's touch next time, just in case, and the time after that. Hale looks resigned rather than puzzled, and his casual touches stop for the entirety of the visit.
He finds a hole where he can pour his water; he's been using it for waste, so the splash of liquid around it doesn't even make Hale suspicious. He paces as Hale reads, pouring it down the hole, mouthful at a time.
The day after that, he feels very tired. (Withdrawal,) supplies Stiles's semantic memory. He doesn't feel like getting up, and when Hale doesn't show, he doesn't bother.
He's cold. He's always cold lately, his weak human body shivering, but they don't dare give him a blanket, do they? Not when he could tear it into strips and fashion a pulley from it somehow, nosir. Nothing is given to the bricoleur, just time and empty space and a brain that's neither fox nor human and is driving him insane.
He tries to turn his focus on Stiles's schoolwork, but it's no use: the words keep sliding off the page and pooling on the ground, getting ink everywhere. He doesn't feel as panicky as he did when he initially had attacks of aphasia, and maybe that's because it's not actual aphasia but a hallucination, this time. He knows the words aren't sliding off the page in real life.
He's pretty sure.
So he closes his eyes and puts up with Scott yelling at him for stabbing him with a pair of chopsticks, and Derek saying he's disappointing the Pack, and Lydia looking down her perfect nose at him, saying that she'd never date a loser like Stiles Stilinski. He shivers and successfully ignores.
A hand smooths the hair at Stiles's brow, and for a moment he thinks Derek has returned. He opens his eyes and then scrambles back, because it's not.
It's not.
"Baby boy," says Stiles Stilinski's mother.
Her hair is shaved off because she kept eating it. Her gold-brown eyes are huge and purple-ringed in her face, and she's slender enough to be some kind of creature they fight, because she pretty much stopped eating once the illness grew bad enough because she swore her husband was trying to poison her.
"I told you, didn't I?" she says in her gentlest, sweetest voice. The stench of rot and decay hits Stiles's nostrils. "I told you you'd grow up to do terrible things."
"No," the nogitsune says, but the words are sparking one of Stiles's memories, and he's eight and his mother is up out of her hospital bed, and she has stolen a scalpel from somewhere, and she's coming towards him, and Stiles's eight-year-old self can't make it parse because no matter what it's his mother and she won't hurt him, she can't, right, she told him she would never, and Stiles believed her, he believed her.
"Just. Like. Me," Claudia says, and her voice is vicious and her face is kind, and the nogitsune doesn't know what to do with this feeling. It's never felt anything this bad before.
He leans to the side and vomits, as though he could expel the feeling from his body by force.
"Oh, Baby Boy," she says. "Do you need to stay home from school today? Are you feeling… sick?" Her hands move through his hair. "You're filthy, aren't you, inside and out? Maybe you'll never be well enough for school."
"Stop. Stop. Please don't. Stiles. Stiles. You've got to come out. I can't. I can't. Don't make me do this alone."
"Talking to himself," Claudia says to an invisible audience, clucking her tongue. "Freak. Insane. They've locked you up down here, haven't they? And left you here to die when they grew tired of you. You didn't think they were trying to reform you, did you? Save you? Awww, sweetheart," she says in a parody of motherly affection that makes the nogitsune want to vomit again and again. "No. You're here to learn what it is to be loved, so you can know what it feels like to be betrayed. That's their revenge. It's good, isn't it?"
He wants to die. He wants to die. He wants to die.
He can't. There's nothing down here. The rock and the string can't kill him. If he accelerated the string with enough velocity around his head repeatedly, he might summon enough force to knock himself out. But there's nothing, nothing, nothing else, and the only thing worse than going through withdrawal and dying of thirst in the dark is going through withdrawal and dying of thirst in the dark with a head injury, so. Not in the cards.
"Stiles. Stiles. Stiles," Claudia says, insistent, but then, as if he's in a dream where someone you swear is one person wears the face of another, he begins to realize it's Melissa in front of him. Melissa McCall. She's wearing her nursing scrubs, cornflower blue today. "Stiles?"
He brings his hand in front of his eyes, and she waits while he counts.
"Hiya," she says.
"H-hiya," the nogitsune replies.
"Off your meds?" she says.
He examines her warily. New people are making him wary, and so are hallucinations. He doesn't think she is a hallucination, is the thing. She looks very matter-of-fact, very Melissa, but she doesn't belong down here, so her presence is very suspect. "Yeah, I. Yeah."
"Okay," she says. "I'm not gonna lie to you. It's bad."
"Like, how bad?"
"Like, your heart stopping bad," Melissa replies. "Come on, sweetheart. We're taking you out of here."
For the first time, he sees Scott standing behind Melissa, eyes gleaming red in the half-light. How Melissa got down. How Melissa's going to leave.
How he's going to leave?
The fox stretches its limbs for what feels like the first time in a long time.
"I wouldn't have let this happen," Melissa is saying. "I can't believe Scott let this happen. I have your meds. Can you swallow all right?"
The nogitsune makes Stiles's head nod, because he can barely believe his good fortune, having Melissa McCall come to his rescue. She tips two pills out into his hand and helps him sit up.
Loading dose? he thinks, and then realizes that the pills don't look anything alike.
"My Adderall…" he says.
"And your Clozaril." She doesn't seem impatient at all. Like she's used to waiting for him to catch up?
He stares at the small, green pill in the palm of Stiles's hand. "Clozaril."
Melissa's eyes narrow in concern. "Do you remember the conversation we had in the hospital after the blackout?"
"After the – no, I don't remember anything. Neither of us," he adds, swiping a hand through his hair.
"Clozaril is an antipsychotic," Melissa explains. "You're taking it for schizophrenia."
Stiles's whirring brain stutters, slips a cog before gamely creaking forward. "Hallucinations. My mom – his mother – was here."
Melissa nods. "Your hallucinations can make you violent, and you can get paranoid. Do you remember that?"
"I can get paranoid? And violent?"
Melissa takes a breath and nods.
"When I'm not on my meds," he says, slowly. "Like… now? Are you trying to say I'm – he's – not possessed? This is bullshit," the nogitsune says. It lifts itself to its feet and crowds Scott against the wall, lifts him up by the throat. "I can do this, I can do all kinds of things I shouldn't be able to do."
Scott doesn't seem inclined to move. "I just know the Clozaril helps your control, and mom and I don't think the nogitsune is in control anymore. Because couldn't a demon-god get out of here? Wouldn't he have done that ages ago? If he really wanted that?"
He looks up at Scott. "The oni. They tested me. I wasn't myself."
"You aren't," Melissa says, hands where he can see them, eyes on her son but making no move to stop him. "You're not the Stiles we know. Of course you're not. They sensed it."
The nogitsune trembles. "Oh my god, this is a really good trick," he says, lowering Scott to the floor, where he turns onto his hands and knees and coughs. "But – weeks? That'd mean that Stiles planted the bombs himself. Without the nogitsune? Because he felt threatened? Paranoid? About the police? His father's the Sheriff, the police should make him feel safe."
"Stiles, your father wasn't at the station, and you knew that," Melissa says, and it sounds practiced, like they've had this conversation before, oh god. "You put Derek and Chris there, to punish them, but you knew they'd survive because… they're Derek and Chris. And of course you were pissed at the police, they'd put your father on notice."
"Stiles wouldn't hurt his coach."
"Our most irritating teacher, next to Harris?" Scott says from the floor, looking none the worse for wear but - what? Reluctant to stand, be thought of as a threat? "Listen, even I've wanted to stab him a time or two. Like, in a passing thought kind of way."
"So you're saying that nearly everything I've done is because Stiles secretly wanted to do it? What about totally destroying the hospital, I – he wouldn't have wanted to do that."
There's a beat of silence. "We couldn't help your mom," Melissa says, soft, and Stiles feels himself pale. "We tried. You've got to know we tried. But her doctor didn't believe her symptoms at first, did he, Stiles? He said she was under a lot of stress, at first, that she should get more sleep. I read her file."
The nogitsune (Stiles?) searches her face.
"Stiles," says Scott, slow. "Me and mom think you won. Like, a long time ago. But… by then, you'd done a lot of things that you really regretted and so –"
"No," he says, cutting Scott off. "No, I – I hurt you. He hurt you."
Scott presses his lips together and approaches, slowly. The nogitsune shuffles away until the small of its back is pressed against the cave face. It gulps, eyes flickering over to Melissa, who hasn't moved, who is staring at the pair with a trembling line of worry at her brow. But then the hands on him pull him back to Scott, who is searching his face with so much sorrow that the air seems to have been sucked away from Stiles's lungs.
"I know it hasn't always been easy. Being my friend," Scott says, lips twitching in an almost-smile. "You always stuck by me, but I'm not stupid enough to think I've never ticked you off, that one of your dark impulses would never be to hurt me."
The nogitsune shakes Stiles's head. Opens his mouth. Nothing comes out.
"Even if you're in a human body, Stiles has the spark, and I think it makes you a little stronger and faster when you've gotta be, right? Or you wouldn't be able to lift me up using Stiles's muscles. He can't normally press a hundred and seventy pounds," Scott says with a hint of desperate humor, and the nogitsune can't imagine what he's getting at until he adds, "so slicing me in half with a katana wouldn't have been a problem. If you'd wanted to."
The nogitsune stares, because the logic is irrefutable: he could have easily killed Scott whenever he wanted to – if he'd wanted to. Maybe he thought that he could continue to feed off of Scott's despair for awhile longer, but Derek is right: holding the sword and twisting it while he spoke in a voice full of care was the most suffering he was ever going to be able to cause Scott McCall.
Killing Scott would have terrified everyone. Derek would have felt the bitter sting of guilty failure, relived the loss of his whole family. Allison would have been in anguish, and Melissa's grief would have dwarfed hers. The idea that Stiles had murdered his best friend would have destroyed his father. The loss of the alpha would have destabilized the pack. It is a possibility, even, that Stiles, as Scott's murderer, would have assumed leadership of the Beacon Hills pack. He could have become an alpha.
He could be an alpha right now, if he so chooses. He is still holding the jagged rock in his palm. He has Scott at a disadvantage, because Scott trusts this face, even after all the nogitsune has done, wearing it. He has the element of surprise on his side.
But.
What if Scott and Melissa are right?
What if he is a crazy – (homicidal!) – schizophrenic mundane? Then, he realizes there is a pretty easy way to figure it all out. (Empiricism. The philosophy of science that emphasizes evidence, especially as discovered in experiments, rather than resting solely on a priori reasoning, intuition, or revelation.)
He pops both pills into his mouth and swallows them dry. Melissa sighs, and Scott slumps over, panting.
"Okay," he says, lips twitching. "Okay, I'm Stiles Stilinski. If that's what you really believe, take me out of here. Take me home."
A/N: Okay, folks. I see that five of you have bookmarked this, but not commented. The only reason I post stories is to get feedback, so feed the beast! Or feed it at ao3. :)
There is a font of nogitsune-related fic that I am about to release. That storyline gave me a lot of ideas; and I was really very disappointed with the second half of 3B, so I plan to re-write it to my heart's content. :D
-K
